DotA 2 n' Valve Game Development

I offer this to the devgaming community as penance for not being on time that I never strictly adhered to. Ahem.


Oh, Valve.

You're the supposed champions of gamers everywhere making entertaining experiences for all. Didja see that word right before champions? "Oooh, this ambiguous internet entity is going to take a dig at Valve. This jackass must be trying to get attention." Well yes, attention would be great to help deviate myself from the other eight and a half million internet game reviewers/critics. But seriously, I want you to go to the wiki page for the Valve Corporation and look at their list of games. Of those listed, only Half Life is their own original franchise.

Team Fortress was originally a Half-Life mod.
Counter Strike was originally a Half-Life mod.
Portal was the concept of some college students in the form of Narbacular Drop.
Left 4 Dead was originally only just a license of the Source engine that was nom'd into the spotlight.
And everything else you have to click on the wiki link to find out what it is.

I neglected to mention DotA 2 specifically because it incited this little tirade. After having seen the trailer for it and being informed of the million dollar tournament being held in a funny-named German city, I was pissed. I was pissed because DotA 2 is called League of Legends.

Now some might argue that it's good that Valve is taking these modders and giving them resources to work on what they're good at. To that point, I cite Riot Games. They were originally modders, but they went out on their own, built a company from the ground up and now have a larger player base than World of Warcraft. And really, what does happen to the teams that develop games for Valve after their series is ostensibly done? At best, they go off to work for someone else. At worst, they stay with Valve to work on content that is most likely not of their own imagining. It's not really cultivating creativity so much as it is wanting to rip the tasty fruit from a young plant and letting it wither soon after.

DotA 2 is an example of Valve just not even fucking trying. They hired one of the hand-me-down devs, IceFrog, left behind by the creator of DotA: Allstars, Steve "Guinsoo" Feak and some other guys at Riot Games. It might be one thing if DotA was still just a Warcraft 3 mod, but there is League of Legends, a game dedicated to succeeding DotA and doing an amazing job of it.

Honestly, I hope this turns into a David and Goliath thing where the tiny Riot Games annihilates the titanic Valve Corporation and sends those Washington pansies back into their den of deceit to make Half Life 3. But, as is often the case with anything that has advertising, DotA 2 will have major success because of banners on the Steam home page, huge tournament sponsorships with Steam as the audience and cross promotion TF2 hats. Is it fair? Fuck no it ain't, but that's the world of today. Hell, that's always been the world. The common man is but a crow, pecking at the dust for shiny objects.

Yes.